Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.
Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be
Exceeding the 65 character limit:
Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures” “Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

]]>http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?feed=rss2&p=140Is Flash SEO Friendly?http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=12
http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=12#respondMon, 24 May 2010 20:27:56 +0000http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=12People who say that Flash is not SEO friendly are absolutely wrong. It is just a myth that Flash is SEO unfriendly.

Creating accessible flash content for search engines is crucial for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1” and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.
Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

]]>http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?feed=rss2&p=120SEO Content Yes Or No?http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=10
http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=10#respondMon, 24 May 2010 20:21:41 +0000http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=10One of the ways search engines determine site ranking is to sort through your online content and rank the site based on repeated keywords or phrases. Content rich websites have found success in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. While I highly recommend this strategy there is another viewpoint that is less dependent on content for exposure for site rankings. Some webmasters are strong proponents of non-content SEO strategies. These technical experts rely very heavily on meta-title and other html or code-based SEO strategies for sites that are less content oriented. Purists on both sides of the argument will say their approach is far superior to the other.

For the content sites they can judge their success through keyword strategies that are observable in long-term site rankings.

For the non-content sites they can observe keywords or phrases being used to determine site rankings from a more technical source in behind-the-scenes code.

So, which is the better approach?

Both.

This really is a matter of being able to have your cake and eat it too. You can maximize SEO strategies in the coding on your site while infusing your website with knowledge based original content.

The combination of these two strategies can work with greater efficiency than either strategy alone.

If you are ill equipped to manage coding then you should work tirelessly to incorporate knowledge based articles into your website.

The standard negative reply to this concept is when a business is primarily selling a product or service and do not feel original content really works with their online store.

If, for instance, your business sells blocks of gourmet cheese you could incorporate original articles on the various cheese offerings, their taste and texture and the history behind each cheese type. You could incorporate articles that provide recipes that include the cheese types you provide.

]]>http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?feed=rss2&p=100Website Top Contributing Factors For Google SEOhttp://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=8
http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=8#respondMon, 24 May 2010 20:16:57 +0000http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=8Websites are quickly becoming one of the most popular ways of advertising. Whether it be a business, its product or service or something completely different, everyone of all ages are turning to the web as a method of getting their message out there. With the popularity of this marketing medium increasing and the number of websites always growing, it is obvious that everyone wants to appear at the top of Google’s search engine rankings. Achieving such a task is never an easy feat, however with a bit of perseverance, one can definitely increase their chances of reaching that glorious first page result.

Given that there is a heap of websites out there who are on the first page, what is their secret? It is a little industry term called “SEO” and it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO basically consists of the customisation of your website, its content and its internal and external links to assist in the overall indexing and ranking of your website in popular search engines. There are many contributing factors that are used in determining a website’s ranking and every search engine is different. This makes trying to optimise your site for Google, Yahoo, Live and the many others quite a pain staking task.

As most of us are aware, Google is currently the most popular search engine for the majority of Internet users. As such, it is only normal that we’d want to focus our sights on achieving a higher ranking within Google first with a hope that the rest will follow. To do this, we must start a journey that could potentially take months before we start seeing any real change, however we have to start somewhere.

Our journey begins by defining some of the key contributing factors that Google uses to determine a website and webpage’s ranking within its results. These factors range from keyword use to manipulating internal and external links and the list goes on. To get you started, we have listed the top twenty factors that you should focus on in order to help get your website that little bit closer to the top of the search engine results listing.

Keyword Use Factors

The following components relate to the use of the user’s search query terms in determining the rank of a particular page.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag – Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

2. Keyword Use in Body Text – Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords – Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.

4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag – Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL – Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com plus target terms in the webpage URL, i.e. seomoz.org/keyword-phrase.

Page Attributes

The following elements comprise how the Google interprets specific data about a webpage independent of keywords.

6. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page 7. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages – Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages? 8. Age of Document – Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant 9. Amount of Indexable Text Content – Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page 10. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) – Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.

Site/Domain Attributes

The factors below contribute to Google’s rankings based on the site/domain on which a page resides.

11. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity) 12. Age of Site – Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership) 13. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site – The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword 14. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world 15. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site – The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.

Inbound Link Attribute

These pieces affect Google’s weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page and ultimately will assist in the ranking of that page.

16. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.

17. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.

18. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.

19. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.

20. Age of Link.

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes

There are also some points we should make before you start getting your hands dirty. With any type of SEO marketing, there are some things that can actually have a negative impact on your ranking. These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or its rankings at Google.

* Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots.

* Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index.

* External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites.

* Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages.

* Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming).

It’s now time to get busy! Start prioritising your tasks, modifying your content and building your internal and external links to meet some of the above guidelines. Keep in mind that improving indexing is mostly a technical task, improving ranking is mostly a business/marketing strategy, what might work now may not work in the future and finally, it takes time. Loads of time. Still, with a bit of trial and error and a good dose of persistence, you can achieve the search engine ranking you’re after.

]]>http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?feed=rss2&p=80Web Design in a World of Changehttp://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=1
http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=1#respondThu, 06 May 2010 22:09:53 +0000http://www.blogseomarketing.com/?p=1Whenever it comes to website design one of the things We really prefer to see is a a lot more hands-free feel with regard to website visitors is automatic updating code. In a few instances this particular information is totally free. In some circumstances you might have to pay something to make use of it or even permit the info to be advertisement supported. Let us say for example that you want to market boats. One may well want the hottest boating news on your website. You can easily look for for sources for the content, which present the actual information possibly as scrolling textual content or in a html box.

Presently there are websites which can easily create customizable content material for your website with regard to important subjects such as internet marketing, news, boating as well as sports and entertainment news. Anyone can insert the code they provide into a website and see as that related information is updated on a frequent basis.

This can certainly be an essential factor with regard to individuals who really don’t want static content on their webpage as well as they can easily make use of information related to the primary website.

The idea is if a targeted visitor clicks on the link inside of the textual content of this information they will be taken away from your website, however if they used the code to find your website then they will likely come back for more.

This is sometimes tough for small business to always keep up with each and every facet of their business and this kind of updating application enables thorough and current information to flow without having input by the webmaster.

The majority of search engines check for related and updating content material. The actual use of a free article directory can certainly assist you in locating fairly specific content material for your website, however for news and current events it can be challenging to obtain permission in order to include the use of this type of current content material. Which is the reason why discovering self-updating source code can certainly end up being essential to ones web design.

You could even separate compact portions of your website to contain stuff such as a quote of the day, this day in history, unusual facts, daily questions and even games.

These kinds of elements can easily add some character to your website as site visitors are becoming used to stimulating content in which never seems to remain the exact same even when some other content might.

One should realize that not each and every html code you position on your web page will tie in with the look and feel of your website. Generally there might end up being a few adjustment you can make to help this. Keep in mind this is also likely that the code may well conflict with your website design and you might need some assistance from a HTML code professional to either repair the coding problem or even locate something else that may be more acceptable.

A few folks are also utilizing RSS feeds to achieve a the same objective. The point is that no matter the technique you make use of to acquire the information the addition of content which continues to be continually changing can help in rendering an much better user experience for your frequent website visitor.

Having a valuable website is only part of the equation. In order for your website to be successful you must have good content. Lawyer Website Marketing